Future plans

Kody · September 20, 2003, 22:23

Careful analysis of the turn has lead me to believe we need to double our terraformers.

Consequently by turn 2139 it is expected that we will have 17 terraformers (that's as far as I played in the simulator). The reason for the dramatic increase in terraformers is to do with 4 factors.

We can pretty much get a defensive probe built anytime we want. So I figure I'll follow buster's lead and build a defensive probe around the same time he does.

1. I'm hold back on colony pod building due to not having the available terraforming infastructure in place. With more terraformers we can prepare the base sites faster and get those new colony pods out.

2. In the simulator testing out of roughly 300 reloads there were 5 mindworm spawning that attacked and destoried crawlers. It was found that mindworms will never appear in a square next to a base. However a fungus patch square 2 away from a base can spawn a mindworm. There are 4 rocky fungus squares that have the possibility of spawning a mindworm. Forest will never spread onto these squares so the fungus will have to be manually removed by terraformers.

3. Additional terraformers can start roading and mining rocky squares. Due our limited number of formers I have avoiding spending the large amounts of time building mines that give 2 mins. With many of our cities +3 in size there is not much space to insert crawlers for further production boosting.

With more +2 mineral terraforming in place we can make extra crawlers to harvest the extra +2 minerals available.

Also I was hoping to changing our energy bonuses to solar panels getting +7 and +6 energy from each respectively.

4. Finally having more terraformers and having rocky roaded mines already in place gives us a head start when we finally get ecological engineering. The rocky roaded mines immediately become +4 minerals, and the additional terraformers can begin making boreholes.

Kody · September 21, 2003, 04:10

Also here is the updated base placement and borehole scheme. A special thanks to Jamski to starting it all rolling.

LandPlanning.jpg, 279KB

Nubclear · September 21, 2003, 04:23

Can someone say "Mindworm Rape"?!?!?!

Kody · September 21, 2003, 04:28

Actually the probability of the mindworm appearing is fairly low.
However, if we leave it for a few years it might just happen. Why take the risk when we can remove it.

I've think I've figured out something else that can be done to remove the threat. You see sensors are supposed to stop mindworms. So with a sensor next to the fungus where the mindworms spawn we should be able to avoid the problem.

Kody · September 21, 2003, 05:16

I did some tests. The chance of mindworms is more like 1 in 100.

With sensors placed near the fungus, the probability seems to drop to something like 1 in 500. Not sure about that because I only did about 900 tests and got 2 mindworms.

Well actually the probability doesn't decrease, just where they appear. With sensors near all the fungus patches the same number of mindworms appeared, but appeared further away from our bases.

Snowflake · September 21, 2003, 15:14

Sounds to me good reasonnings for more terraformers.

Jamski · September 22, 2003, 10:32

There's sooooooo many reasons to get more terraformers. the faster we get the forming done, the faster we can expand, and when the tech comes up an army of terraformers can raise land at a truely frightening rate

I can't imagine ever having too many formers.

-Jam

Snowflake · September 22, 2003, 12:05

Yeay! Raise our land so that our underground rooms are higher than the 6th floor of the rec commons!